This invention relates to a new and improved method and apparatus for manufacturing the component pieces used in constructing artificial mat roads. Artificial mat road surfaces are widely used and required where ground conditions are poor and there is a temporary need to move trucks and other heavy equipment in and out of a remote site. Presently temporary road structures are installed by bringing out a whole construction crew which will lay down gravel, shale or the like for a temporary road surface. Alternatively a construction crew could lay down a whole series of heavy timber boards to make a temporary road. Such board roads are especially used where environmental concerns mandate that everything that is brought into the construction area be removed, for instance, in protected wet-lands or marsh areas. The normal method of construction is to use boards anywhere from ten feet to twenty feet long and anywhere from one and a half to two and a half inches thick and from six to eight inches wide. These boards are very heavy and require manual manipulation and a lot of man power to construct board roads which sometimes run for miles.
The present state of the industry is such that supplies of boards and nails or other fasteners are separately trucked to the remote sites, and then each individual board is placed into position, requiring at least two men per board, and then after the boards are in position they are fastened together with heavy penny nails by driving the nails with sledge hammers or axes.
Such a method of construction of these board roads is obviously very labor intensive and capital intensive, but the clean up and removal of these board roads is even more labor intensive and capital intensive.
A related patent application, Ser. No. 161,780, filed Feb. 29, 1988 discusses a solution to the labor intensive and capital intensive problem presented by the present state of the art. In that patent application there is disclosed a new and improved method for constructing artificial roads. Construction of board roads is done by providing a prefabricated mat system so that the boards do not have to be nailed together in the field. The mats are configured so that they will be laid down in an interlocking relationship. The laying down of these components of a board road can be done by forklift or other equipment, and therefore can be done much more quickly and economically than the laying down and dismantling of board roads which are assembled and nailed together in the field.